Head of School's Message: October 5

A Message from the Head of School 

Last Monday at the front gate, in response to my question about what they did over the weekend, most Lower School students mentioned birthday parties, Hotel Transylvania 2or AYSO soccer. One first grade girl held onto my hand a little longer than usual and said, “I looked at the moon. It was amazing.” She reminded me of the saying that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Our first grader shared a moment of wide-eyed wonder that lingered with her. If lessons about the moon were being taught that day, she was ready to learn them.
 
In an interview about his book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Movement That’s Transforming Education, Ken Robinson writes that we live in two worlds. “We live in a world that was there before we came into it. It’s a world of other people, of objects, events and circumstances, the material world, the social world. It was there before you got here and it will be there when you’re gone. But there’s a world that exists because you’re in it. It’s a world of your own feelings and emotions, the world of your private consciousness that only exists because you exist. Education has to address these worlds equally and the relationships between them.”
 
Lower School Spanish Teacher Katie Villanueva is bringing these worlds together in her kindergarten gardening program, a gardening program that with the help of Chandler parent Phaedra Ledbetter is extending to other grades. At our back-to-school faculty meetings in August, Katie presented a gardening curriculum that she designed this summer that incorporated academic skills into a series of gardening projects. The kids love it.
 
We bring the students’ two worlds together at Chandler through project-based learning, the act of learning about different subjects simultaneously. In upper elementary grades and in the Middle School, this is achieved by guiding students to identify, through researching their STEAM projects, a real-world problem (local to global) developing its solution using evidence to support the claim, and presenting the solution through a multimedia approach based on a set of 21st-century tools. The learning process starts afresh each morning with every one of your children bringing unique senses of wonder and curiosity to school to take our breath away.

PLEASE NOTE:

I will be hosting a monthly parent coffee for any K-8 parent who would like to attend. The first coffee will be held this Thursday, Oct. 8, from 8:15–9 a.m. in the Lower School library. I will give you a perspective on how the school year is going and answer any questions that you may have. The monthly coffees have been scheduled during the day, but if there is a demand I am happy to schedule half of the coffees at night to make it easier for all parents to attend. Please let me know if you have interest in an evening coffee.
 
  
Most sincerely,

 
John Finch
Head of School
Back